Let me start by saying what a great tool Overseer is. It was developed over 30 years ago, to enable farmers to determine their fertiliser application rates on pasture and it has supported farmers to learn more about nutrient loss from their farms.
What’s wrong with that?
Overseer “exists to enable New Zealand farmers to be environmentally and economically sustainable”.
I don’t have a problem with that either.
Overseer is in a state of constant improvement. All profits are ploughed back into improving the system. Overseer is a totally different product now than it was 30 years ago, or even 10.
That is a credit to the system.
Overseer is a valuable on-farm tool that was developed and is owned by AgResearch, MPI and the fertiliser industry, Ballance and Ravensdown. It remains a valuable on-farm tool. What it isn’t is a scientific monitoring system that measures nutrient losses in a highly precise manner.
It was never designed to do that. We had councils insisting that was the case and Federated Farmers insisting it wasn’t. Now the system has been called to question councils who have conveniently tried to pass the blame onto environment commissioners. I don’t accept that.
What happened was that regional councils anointed Overseer for a purpose it was never designed to fulfill. Farmers and scientists told them that. Councils didn’t listen.
Then a couple of years ago the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, (PCE), suggested that Overseer was not an adequate regulatory tool. Farmers hadn’t suggested that it was.
What followed was that we had a government-appointed review panel to assess Overseer as a regulatory tool. Unlike most committees chosen by governments over the years, the members weren’t chosen to give the Government the answers it wanted. The Overseer review was carried out by scientists appointed by scientists.
I accept their findings but they should not have come as a surprise to anyone. Overseer is a state-of-the-art on-farm management tool, not some scientific analysis and prediction system.
The report acknowledges some of the difficulties that occur.
“Nutrient losses from farms respond to various factors including management and climate. Measuring nutrient losses is challenging and cannot capture the entire range of possible conditions that might occur,” the report said.
While I totally agree with the statement, the report then addresses modelling, which I do have issues with.
There’s been commentary that Overseer has had its day. I totally reject that.
The good news is that Ministers Damien O’Connor and David Parker have agreed to “work on improving tools to manage nutrient losses on farms”. They will support “the development of the next generation of Overseer alongside a suite of tools to help in the management and estimation of on farm nutrient loss”.
They accept that “a more accurate way to estimate nutrient loss is important to farmers, the environment and brand New Zealand”. I agree.
I heard Parker on Radio NZ. He didn’t want to put farmers off using Overseer and he didn’t think the system was “fatally flawed”. He was also committed to developing a new Overseer, which was reassuring.
Moving forward, my fond hope is that anything done is scientifically robust and peer reviewed.
I’ve heard the arguments about nitrogen caps for fertiliser and they seem simplistic and unscientific.
For example, I can limit my use of nitrogen fertiliser and then use poultry fertilisers and soybean meal as a supplementary feed creating greater N runoff.
Input limits of any type won’t be effective for the same reason.
Real-time monitoring isn’t an option either.
For a start, you’d need sophisticated monitors in every paddock to have any chance of a reliable reading.
So what we have is an agriculture initiative, Overseer, that has for 30 years assisted farmers in their quest for supporting the environment and improving sustainability.
It was never designed as a regulatory tool. That was foisted on it by councils.
As an aside, as I’ve stated Overseer is in a state of continual improvement. What that means is that different variations of the system can give different results. I had a mate in Manawatū who was bemoaning the fact that he was compliant for one version of the system but not on another. The regional council back then had changed the version of Overseer without quite realising the implications of doing so.
That’s another example of why Overseer shouldn’t be used as a regulatory tool.
From here the path forward is simple in my view.
Farmers continue to use Overseer as they have for over 30 years. Overseer continues to be developed and improved as it has for that time.
The Government assists with that improvement as O’Connor and Parker have promised.
Life will go on and Overseer will continue to play a pivotal part in helping farmers on their journey to develop a sustainable and environmentally responsible future.
